notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
-------------------------------------
A blog about RPGs and settings.

the dead

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths[.]

Carolina Death Crawl (free PDF, here) is a storygame with a particularly interesting mechanic perfect for an OSR game. As a game, CDC is about a ragtag group of Civil War soldiers—Southerners, fighting for the North—making their way through the ravaged countryside, trying to find home or hope or redemption—and finding none—along the way.

William Strang, Come Hell or High Water, etching (1893).

Characters die. But as the game is a one-shot, there’s no rerolling (or replacing) characters. Rather, when a PC dies (and they will), it becomes a swamp ghost. That is, some fragment of the collective spirit of spite and loss and recrimination that haunts the Carolina swamps and brings grief to the living. What this means in game terms is that the player ceases playing the dead character, rises from the chair, and becomes a vengeful ghost. “The job of the Swamp Ghosts is to compel the survivors to reflect on the horrors and atrocities in their past and guide them into an unspeakable future.” The ghosts—should there be more than one—scheme and conspire in secret, then return to pace the room, always at a (still-living) player’s shoulder, whispering imprecations into an ear or casting portentous doom upon the table.

This, of course, just feels right for a certain sort of ugly D&D shitgame. But there’s a different feel here. It’s too easy to create a game of grit and unpleasantness—mire, disease, sullen go-nowhere villagers—for a mood of poverty, physical and spiritual. There’s a difference between mud and venom. CDC is about guilt and spite and the weight of your own actions accreting to you. If you’re going to have a shitgame, may as well go all the way.

Next time a PC dies, instead of rolling up another one or animating a hireling, make a ghost. And let the ghosts of PCs-passed1 remind those living just how foolish and morally bankrupt they are.